Green Circle Growers featured in article by Hort Americas and Dave Kuack:
US (OH): Creating the ideal environment for orchid production
“We have a high efficiency production system,” said grower manager Frank Paul in an article by Dave Kuack on the corporate blog of Hort Americas. “Everything is standardized. Everything follows a certain path through our facility.”
Paul said orchids are very manipulative. The greenhouses are divided into vegetative areas and generative areas. All of the vegetative areas are at 83ºF and 65 percent relative humidity. The greenhouses are equipped with a high pressure fog system for humidity control and also receive supplemental carbon dioxide.
“Throughout the different vegetative stages of orchid production the light levels are slowly increased, but the temperature and humidity remain fairly similar,” he said. “The young plant stage is an average 26 weeks. After the young plant stage, the mature plants in 5-inch pots remain in a vegetative stage for about 24 weeks before being moved into a cooling stage.
“Only when the plants are large enough to produce good quality flower spikes are they moved into the cooling stage. During the cooling stage, the temperatures are lowered to an average of 70ºF along with an increase in light levels that initiates the flower spikes. From flower initiation to shipping is 19 weeks.”
In order to produce plants as uniform as possible, a set of grading steps was implemented. A camera is used for objective grade determination.
“Whatever plants are not up to size receive a longer period of time in the vegetative stage,” Paul said. “Once plants reach the size that is necessary to produce good quality flower spikes they are moved to the generative or cooling stage. Our goal is to make the output as uniform as possible at the highest possible quality.”
Click here for the complete article with GCG on the corporate blog of Hort Americas . The article is written by David Kuack, who is a freelance technical writer in Fort Worth, Texas; [email protected].
